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Has your Firefox 3 started taking forever to load? I found a solution that may help
Posted by BostonPeng on 24 July 2008
I’m not entirely sure when it started, but at some point after Firefox 3 came out I’ve noticed that it was taking longer than it used to to get from clicking the launcher to getting to my custom start page. I finally did a rough timing on it a few days ago and found it was taking 3-4 minutes to load. I knew something just wasn’t right, especially when I saw that starting Firefox 3 in safe mode gave me me start page in under half a minute.
I recently got a Sony Clie T615 as a belated birthday pressie from my mom to replace my old black and white Sony Clie (thanks, Mom!) and one of the things I installed on it was BigClock, a freeware clock for PalmOS devices that also includes a pair of timers. I fired up Firefox in Safe Mode and found that it took about 25 seconds to load (I don’t recall the exact time now) so I started disabling extensions like mad and found that enabling Adblock Plus (ABP) added over a minute to my load time. I knew that shouldn’t happen so I posted a query on the ABP forums about it.
Once I finally figured out how to see which filters I had subscribed to I saw that not only did I have the FiltersetG, which is strongly recommended against, I also had the Malware Domains filter. I don’t recall why I added the Malware Domains filter but I removed it and my load time jumped to where it should be. I already had the EasyList filters and I was advised to compliment it with the other two two Easy* filters. Now my load time is 45 seconds from clicking the launcher to getting my start page, which is still a tad long but definitely something I can live with.
If you find Firefox is taking a while to load for you and you have Adblock Plus, before you kill APB check out which filters you have by going into your Adblock Plus Preferences window and collapse any filters you’ve installed. If they include FiltersetG and/or Malware Domains remove them. That should get you loading faster, regardless of what operating system you’re running.
I’ve skimmed over the entire process I went through but you can read it on the Adblock Plus Forums (free registration may be required).
I had some links I wanted to post but this week has been so crazy that by the time i got ready to post links this morning too many of them were at least a couple of days old and I decided to simply not post them. I do have a link or two that I’ll try to post in the morning, but if I don’t get them posted tomorrow before I have to head AFK for the day I’ll post them on Saturday.
Steven R said
I had come across this issue a while back, around version 2.0 of Firefox, similar solution though. All I have ever run for the past year or so, is the three Easy List filters, plus the odd blocked item, works a treat with no slow down on load times.
Geldy said
You have no idea how much I appreciate the above article. Thanks!